At Purple Giraffe we understand that search engine optimisation (SEO) can be a tricky topic to understand and apply to your own brand’s website. SEO is the process of optimising a website to enhance its visibility on search engines. This involves improving factors like content, keywords, and backlinks.
SEO is crucial as it boosts organic traffic, increases site credibility, and ensures a competitive edge. It’s a cost-effective strategy that adapts to changing trends, ultimately improving user experience, and expanding a website’s reach both locally and globally.
To help you hit the ground running and excel your website’s SEO we’ve compiled a small list of the most common mistakes and how you can avoid or fix them with the help of free online tools.
Ignoring Mobile Optimisation
In this mobile friendly world, this is something that should be avoided at all costs to make the most of your SEO success. With the use of smartphones and many other portable devices constantly on the rise, it is essential for you to make your content mobile friendly.
How to avoid – To do this, it is important your brands webpage and content is optimised for a whole host of different devices, including smartphones, tablets, e-readers and smartwatches. You can also utilise free to use tools such as PageSpeed Insights to test the mobile optimisation of your brands webpage.
Forgetting Keyword Importance
Improving your keyword research will help you get an edge over your competitors and gain a better standing in your Google search rankings. The use of relevant keywords will not only boost your Google search ranking but will also make finding your content including blog posts, sales pages etc much easier and therefore increase your brands organic traffic and overall success in SEO.
How to avoid – To get ahead of the competition with keyword research try using more relevant keywords across your digital platforms and most importantly on your website. For example, if your brand is based on selling gin in Australia, make sure you use alcohol related keywords such as, spirits, Botanicals and Juniper. Make use of meta titles (titles of blogs, images) and ensure you include the most relevant keywords in that title to enhance your SEO.
- Remember to use relevant keywords related to your brand and products
- Make use of free keyword research tools like Semrush to discover the most optimal keywords for your industry and topic
- Write clever and unique titles and descriptions for your webpages
- Think about the intention behind the keyword to capitalise more
- Tactically place keywords towards the start of your title and sentences to enhance optimisation and increase traffic
Misusing or Not Using Quality Backlinks
Backlinks are like the backbone of your SEO strategy, the more the better. But having bad quality ones (not reputable, toxic or spam links) won’t put you on Google’s good side and will ultimately affect your Google search ranking! That’s why having good quality backlinks is important for your overall SEO strategy.
Backlinks are how potential customers get to your webpages from other webpages on a search engine. Essentially a positive tip off for your brand. They are provided links usually from sponsors, partners or any brand that may wish to feature your brand on their website.
How to avoid – Some sure-fire ways to counter this issue is to only partner with reputable brands that will link to your webpage. Create high quality content that attracts high quality backlinks as a result. Your brand can also monitor when mentions are posted with Google Alerts and then decide if they should be used or not as a backlink opportunity.
Slow Webpage Loading
Having a slow webpage loading time is like having a slow car that never starts. No one wants that, especially potential customers visiting your website. Having a slow webpage may deter your customers and make your bounce rate (the number of customers that only go to the first page on a website) higher as a result.
How to avoid – Avoiding this involves optimising your webpage as a whole by compressing images, reducing font sizes, and getting rid of any unnecessary plugins that take up a lot of resources and thus increase load time. Your brand can also implement reducing HTTP requests on your webpage to reduce the load times further. Regularly checking your website performance is a great way to reduce your load times and engage potential customers.
Feel free to check out our free digital image optimisation resource tool where we give you the run down on how to compress and name your images for SEO. Download it here!
This is just a small yet crucial number of ways to improve your SEO strategy. Remember to consistently review your website and SEO performance to ensure it is performing well and enhancing your business’s ranking. By implementing these strategies, you can be sure to see an improvement in your search engine ranking in no time!
And if this all seems a bit too overwhelming or you simply don’t have the time to execute it, our expert team of professionals are here to help take your business to the next level. Contact us today and let’s chat!
